Comment by progval | Hacker News Reader

Comment by progval | Hacker News Reader

I wish people would stop sharing this website, their research is massively written by LLMs and looks good at a glance, but it goes in every direction at the same time and lacks logical connections. And the claims don't really match their sources.

Their initial publication was backed by a Git repository with hundreds of pages of documents written in just three days (https://web.archive.org/web/20260314224623/https://tboteproj...). It also contained nonsense like an "anomaly report" with recommendations from the LLM agent to itself, which covers an analysis of contributors to Linux's BPF, Android's Gerrit, and parser errors in using legislative databases. https://web.archive.org/web/20260314103202/https://tboteproj... . The repository was rewritten since, though.

This post follows their usual pattern. The second source they link to has been a dead link for 11 months (https://web.archive.org/web/20250501000000*/https://www.pala...). There's a lot about Persona's design, MCPs, vulnerabilities, data leaks, but nothing proving they use it for mass surveillance. The entire case for it being mass surveillance rests on two points: that they interact with AI companies and they offer MCP endpoints (section titled "Persona's Surveillance Architecture")

Thank you. Investigative journalism is so important and I would happily believe some of the claims made here, but when I encounter even just a few sentences that sound LLM-written, suddenly I don't trust any of the statements in the source anymore. This site goes way beyond that, with a vibe-coded UI and generated articles. There might be value in what's reported here, but currently it requires a lot of work from the reader.

You dont trust LLM's, writers with an IQ and knowledge much higher than ours? /s

I was told LLMs were at least as smart as Ph.D graduates

The earlier you realize how little IQ and "knows a lot" means the person actually know what they're talking about, the easier life becomes. "Smart" people are wrong all the time, some say how they became smart in the first place.

Yes, and HN isn't a place to submit things that require work from the reader. Or at least that seems to be the consensus by reporting it.

Quite disappointing tbh.

> There's a lot about Persona's design, MCPs, vulnerabilities, data leaks, but nothing proving they use it for mass surveillance.

And this is where I'd say I disagree. There's nothing about Peter Thiel, and his current business focus, that shows anyone he's not in the business of surveillance. Look at the company he keeps and then align that with many of the things Peter and who he surrounds himself with have said publicly. Thiel is tied to Palantir and Alex Karp. That relationship alone should tell you very clearly that, even if Thiel wasn't actually in the game of surveillance (opinion: he is) he would be very much associated with supporting it.

Karp said: “I love the idea of getting a drone and having light fentanyl-laced urine spraying on analysts that tried to screw us.”

Yeah, sure... I mean I can't imagine the fact that Thiel is tied at the hip to Palantir that he doesn't have an agenda with it other than data analytics and, what, ad rev? Right.

Thiel said, publicly, that everyone should be concerned about surveillance AI [0]. Let's call spade a spade. Thiel is in the business of surveillance whether or not there's some poor LLM generated sites stating that is the case, but then using that as the basis to give Thiel a pass on this because: not enough evidence here.

Thiel is a big part of what's wrong with his class. He's worried about something that he wants to control. He's not actually worried about you or I though. He's worried about someone else having the full surveillance view and so he's aimed to build and be part of that. So, maybe, we shouldn't give Thiel a pass just because he hasn't fully proven himself to be the person that the world paints him into a picture of.

[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/22/palantirs-peter-thiel-survei...

For what it’s worth, Persona claims to not work or interact with Thiel.

https://vmfunc.re/blog/persona-2

That's cute, but they've taken his money. To say they've never interacted with him is disingenuous. And... Are we really going to default to a perspective of trust from Persona? Nobody should trust them by default as they've proven nothing to the public with regard to trustworthiness.

It's written by a bot to avoid fingerprinting.

https://tboteproject.com/git/hekate/surveillancefindings-new...

Stylometry avoidance is not a valid excuse for factual omissions, fabrications, and "DYOR dumping" (bullshit asymmetry).

Thanks for flagging this. I still think the headline is right, so where are the good sources and articles and outcries?

It's currently #1 on the front page too. HN drowning in AI slop, what a sight to behold.

It seems like there are a few stories HN will really bite on:

- age verification

- chat control

- RTO vs. remote work

- AI bubble

- ditching American tech

I support a rule to ban AI-generated/edited posts.

Initially I thought they'd be fine, because AI-generated isn't intrinsically an issue and the comments can be good. But in practice, the AI posts tend to be slop, and usually there's a better human-written source for the same topic (for example, one of the many other recent "age verification is mass surveillance" posts here).

It is not so easy to distinguish this with 100% accuracy though.

For instance, a recent example from yesterday:

https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/21982

Part of this was written by AI, but with a human in "charge" who explained which part of AI was used here. Would that also be a bannable example for you? I am not so convinced that this is bannable per se. Perhaps it may be different if the AI-slop was not announced, but when it was announced and explained?

> one of the many other recent "age verification is mass surveillance" > posts here

Well, it actually is. It taps very much into other similar laws e. g. "chat control", aka chat sniffing.

I should've said "guideline". I think posts can include AI if it's reasonable and/or they're good, while the guideline gives a reason to flag AI posts that are generally bad.

> It taps very much into other similar laws e. g. "chat control", aka chat sniffing.

There are many recent Chat Control posts here too. I agree Chat Control is bad, and poorly-implemented age verification is bad (though it can be implemented in privacy-preserving ways, albeit ineffectively; I commented about this 42 days ago at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47123507, and it was stale then). I don't want to hear anymore about it. Maybe I need a filter myself, for the lucky 10,000. But the problem even for them, is that the repeated posts (without links to previous posts) have mostly low-effort comments, because people who made high-effort comments can't/won't keep repeating them.

The vast majority of HN commentors react to the headline and don't bother to click through.

seems a lot of people already consumed this as truth.

In the meantime a FOSS maintainer who is just trying to put the pieces in place to comply with the law (as written) got doxxed and harassed.

I hate it here

> In the meantime a FOSS maintainer who is just trying to put the pieces in place to comply with the law (as written) got doxxed and harassed.

In my experience, when a country like Britain passes a censorship law, people in other countries like America don't enjoy being given the tools to comply with it, even if the tools are entirely optional.

The main thing that caused this ruckus was law passed in California not the UK

not that it matters because doxxing and harassing developers is not acceptable.

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